John Shotter
Biographic Data
| ID | 3619663 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Shotter |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Shotter |
| SIGNATURE | SHOTTER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of New Hampshire |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 208 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1968 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Wittgenstein and Language Games in Qualitative Research
I am in conversation with a friend. She is trying to tell me something complicated, but she goes from one sentence to the next too quickly for me to “follow” her.
The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture
“Just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric” - the first half of this central statement from the International Rhetoric Culture Project is abundantly evidenced. It is the latter half that this volume explores: how does culture emerge out of rhetorical action, out of seemingly dispersed individual actions and interactions? The contributors do not rely on rhetorical “text” alone but engage the situational, bodily, and of…
Why being dialogical must come before being logical: The need for a hermeneutical–dialogical approach to robotic activities
Agential Realism
In placing the agential cuts – that is, the distinctions we make between subjective and objective “things” in different places at different times in our inquiries – we do not uncover pre‐existing facts about such independently existing “things,” we bring different versions of these “things” into existence
Worldly beings becoming human beings: Differentiations and articulations within our different ways of being
These excellent papers by Pablo Rojas and Mariagrazia Grantella, both in their own very different ways, begin to bring into view aspects of our social psychological functioning that Descartes’ mechanical–mathematical world view has occluded, i.e., made rationally invisible to us. They both emphasize the degree to which we have our being within already flowing, intra-mingling, strands of both physical and social activities that influence us more t…
Undisciplining Social Science: Wittgenstein and the Art of Creating Situated Practices of Social Inquiry
There are now countless social scientific disciplines—listed either as the science of ... X ... or as an ‐ology of one kind or another—each with their own internal controversies as to what are their “proper objects of their study.” This profusion of separate sciences has emerged, and is still emerging, tainted by the classical C artesian‐ N ewtonian assumption of a mechanistic world. We still seem to assume that we can begin our inquiries simply …
Agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings: Sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns
If Barad’s account of agential realism is correct, then the psychological “things” that we name as “thoughts,” “ideas,” “theories,” “knowledge,” or “observations,” and study as the products of processes hidden within the heads of individuals, are better talked of as emerging within material intra-actions occurring in activities out in the world at large. For, in placing the agential cuts, i.e., the distinctions we make between subjective and obje…
From within the thick of it: Human beings doing being human in languaged worlds
In this commentary I note that Lipari and Bertau want to assume that we live immersed in a flowing, stranded, agential reality in which no-“thing” is separate from any-“thing” else. Thus rather than being wholly in control of the unfolding processes of importance to us, we need to see ourselves as essentially living within dialogical and hermeneutical, back-and-forth relations with the others and othernesses around us. So although we may assume o…
From ‘after the fact’ objective analyses to immediate ‘before the fact’ living meanings
The worlds of therapeutic interactions, and especially the worlds of our everyday social exchanges, as portrayed in the conceptualizations and theories proposed in research papers, are in fact very different from the worlds within which we all actually live our everyday lives. This is not because I think the conceptualizations and theories offered are in fact inadequate, but because as identifiable and nameable causal process they can only be see…
Agentive Spaces, the “Background”, and Other Not Well Articulated Influences in Shaping our Lives
What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter‐action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holisti…
The rhetorical emergence of culture
Embodiment, abduction, and expressive movement: A new realm of inquiry
I argue that there is a much more immediate and unreflective, bodily way of being related to our surroundings than the ways that become conspicuous to us in our more cognitive reflections. Further, I suggest that this way of relating or orienting ourselves toward our surroundings becomes known to us from within the unfolding dynamics of our engaged bodily movements within them, and that we can come to embody the recurrent patterns that we experie…
Gergen, Confluence, and his Turbulent, Relational Ontology: The Constitution of Our Forms of Life within Ceaseless, Unrepeatable, Intermingling Movements
Bateson, Double Description, Todes, and Embodiment: Preparing Activities and Their Relation to Abduction
Does all understanding consist in our using concepts to relate to the things around us, or do we also possess a more direct, spontaneous, bodily way of doing so? I explore this second possibility via Bateson's (1979 ) notion of “double description.” These phenomena are dynamic phenomena, in that they have their existence only in our embodied relations to the temporal unfolding of events in the two or more relevant sources. As such, as Bateson (19…
Vygotsky and Consciousness as Con-scientia , as Witnessable Knowing Along with Others
All our higher mental functions are mediated processes, says Vygotsky, and signs are the basic means used to master and direct them. But how can this be if our words and other signs work only in a purely representational, ‘picturing’ fashion? For they still need interpreting as to their meaning. The ‘inner observation’ problem remains unsolved. Our significant expressions must also work on us in another way: by the living expressions of others pr…
On the edge of social constructionism: Wittgensteinian inquiries into organizations and management
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to outline a distinctive kind of qualitative inquiry, strongly influenced by Wittgenstein's very practical philosophical investigations. Design/methodology/approach The paper describes how there is a very clear, but not yet fully recognized, difference between (at least some crucial forms of dialogically‐structured) qualitative research and current more quantitative forms – a difference that is not fully captu…
From Minds Hidden in the Heads of Individuals to the Use of Mind‐Talk between Us: Wittgensteinian Developmental Investigations 1
I criticize Carpendale and Lewis's (2004 ) attempt to produce a Wittgensteinian theory , as an alternative to work in the “theory of mind” (TOM) tradition, not because I disagree with it as theory, but because Wittgenstein would be critical of any attempt to make such a use of his work. Theories are concerned with discovering rules, principles, of lawful regularities hidden behind appearances. Wittgenstein's whole latter philosophy is inimical to…
Understanding Process From Within: An Argument for 'Withness'-Thinking
If our task is simply that of theorizing process, then there are many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past to turn to. But as I see it, these writers are mostly oriented toward helping us think about process 'from the outside', about processes that we merely observe as happening 'over there'. But if we are to rethink appropriate styles of empirical research, then we need a different form of engaged, responsive thinking, acting, and t…
Responsive expression in living bodies: The power of invisible 'real presences' within our everyday lives together
In the past, in our talk of meanings, we have been used to thinking of them as working in terms of inner mental representations, and to thinking of such representations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation in terms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to be understood. This view of communication and understanding as 'information processing' has been hegemonic in social theory now for quite some time. He…
Real Presences: Meaning as Living Movement in a Participatory World
In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as working in terms of mental representations, and to thinking of such representations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation in terms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to be understood. Here, however, I argue that the meaningfulness of our language does not initially depend on its systematicity, but on our spontaneous, living, bodily responsiven…
The Situation of Social Constructionism: Its `Imprisonment' within the Ritual of Theory-Criticism-and-Debate
In a recent exchange in Theory & Psychology, in which (mostly Gergen's) social constructionism was the subject of some criticism, Gergen (2001a) remarked toward the end of his response, `I no longer find the tradition of argumentation a viable one.... Yet in order to sustain the dialogue, I find myself nevertheless drawn into the ritual' (p. 431). He does not, however, expand any further on this comment. Yet, as he is someone committed to the vie…
For Another First Time: “Instructive Spontaneities” in Dialogical Moments
Preview this article: For Another First Time: “Instructive Spontaneities” in Dialogical Moments, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ni.10.1.18kat-1.gif
Seeing Historically: Goethe and Vygotsky's 'Enabling Theory-Method
We can study dead forms from a distance, seeking to understand the pattern of past events that caused them to come into existence. We can, however, enter into a relationship with living forms and, in making ourselves open to their movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to them, and in so doing, we can gain a sense of their character. In other words, from within our dialogically structured involvements with other living things, a kind …
A Third Way: From Units and Categories to Dialogically Structured, Responsive, Practical Understandings
Contents Vol. 42, 1999
Understanding Process From Within: An Argument for 'Withness'-Thinking
If our task is simply that of theorizing process, then there are many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past to turn to. But as I see it, these writers are mostly oriented toward helping us think about process 'from the outside', about processes that we merely observe as happening 'over there'. But if we are to rethink appropriate styles of empirical research, then we need a different form of engaged, responsive thinking, acting, and t…
Hearing the patient's 'voice: Toward a social poetics in diagnostic interviews
Duality of Structure” and “Intentionality” in an Ecological Psychology
Bakhtin and Billig: Monological Versus Dialogical Practices
Accounting for Place and Space
It is proposed that social practices-practical social activities-involve a kind of knowledge distinct both from technical skills (knowing-how) and the application of theoretical knowledge (knowing-that); they involve a knowing of the third kind (knowing-from), a contextual form of knowing from within a situation which takes into account, in what is known, the situation within which it is known. Such a kind of knowledge cannot be communicated in t…
Living in a Wittgensteinian World: Beyond Theory to a Poetics of Practices
As human beings, we share many historically developed, language‐game interwoven, public forms of life. Due to the joint, dialogically responsive nature of all social life within such forms, we cannot as individuals just act as we please; our forms of life exert a normative influence on what we can say and do. They act as a backdrop against which all our claims to knowledge are judged as acceptable or not. As a result, it is not easy to articulate…
Prolegomena to an Understanding of Play
Rhetoric and the recovery of civil society
By privileging the search for an overall order, both in its theorizing and in its aim, modern social theory has paid insufficient attention to the ‘zones’ of activity in between established institutions-called here the realm of civil society. This is an important neglect. For although the activity in such zones appears essentially disorderly, it permits many local and momentary orderings. Indeed, if one can speak of the ‘common sense’ of a social…
Acquired Powers: The Transformation of Natural into Personal Powers
Seeing Historically: Goethe and Vygotsky's 'Enabling Theory-Method
We can study dead forms from a distance, seeking to understand the pattern of past events that caused them to come into existence. We can, however, enter into a relationship with living forms and, in making ourselves open to their movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to them, and in so doing, we can gain a sense of their character. In other words, from within our dialogically structured involvements with other living things, a kind …
Dialogical Realities: The Ordinary, the Everyday, and Other Strange New Worlds
We tend to seek theoretical explanations of our own human behavior, to understand everything we do as arising, computationally, from a systematic set of simple laws, principles, or rules. Here, influenced by the later Wittgenstein, I argue that the very possibility of the kind of talk we use in our theorizing arises out of the joint or dialogical activities in which we engage in our practical lives together, and only has its meaning within the co…
Social Construction: Knowledge, Self, Others, and Continuing the Conversation
Social constructionism’s relevance to communication studies is demonstrated through the development of three arguments. First, as theories of knowledge presume a theory of human functioning with others, traditional conceptions of the person are subject to transformation. Second, theories of communication are carefully intertwined with theories of the person and philosophies of knowledge. And, third, the conversational context of everyday life hol…
Agentive Spaces, the “Background”, and Other Not Well Articulated Influences in Shaping our Lives
What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter‐action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holisti…
Harré, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Vico, Wittgenstein: Academic Discourses and Conversational Realities
Bateson, Double Description, Todes, and Embodiment: Preparing Activities and Their Relation to Abduction
Does all understanding consist in our using concepts to relate to the things around us, or do we also possess a more direct, spontaneous, bodily way of doing so? I explore this second possibility via Bateson's (1979 ) notion of “double description.” These phenomena are dynamic phenomena, in that they have their existence only in our embodied relations to the temporal unfolding of events in the two or more relevant sources. As such, as Bateson (19…
Undisciplining Social Science: Wittgenstein and the Art of Creating Situated Practices of Social Inquiry
There are now countless social scientific disciplines—listed either as the science of ... X ... or as an ‐ology of one kind or another—each with their own internal controversies as to what are their “proper objects of their study.” This profusion of separate sciences has emerged, and is still emerging, tainted by the classical C artesian‐ N ewtonian assumption of a mechanistic world. We still seem to assume that we can begin our inquiries simply …
Responsive expression in living bodies: The power of invisible 'real presences' within our everyday lives together
In the past, in our talk of meanings, we have been used to thinking of them as working in terms of inner mental representations, and to thinking of such representations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation in terms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to be understood. This view of communication and understanding as 'information processing' has been hegemonic in social theory now for quite some time. He…
Now I can go on: ’ Wittgenstein and our embodied embeddedness in the ‘Hurly-Burly’ of life
Texts of Identity
The defense of empirical psychology
From Minds Hidden in the Heads of Individuals to the Use of Mind‐Talk between Us: Wittgensteinian Developmental Investigations 1
I criticize Carpendale and Lewis's (2004 ) attempt to produce a Wittgensteinian theory , as an alternative to work in the “theory of mind” (TOM) tradition, not because I disagree with it as theory, but because Wittgenstein would be critical of any attempt to make such a use of his work. Theories are concerned with discovering rules, principles, of lawful regularities hidden behind appearances. Wittgenstein's whole latter philosophy is inimical to…
Rhetoric and the Roots of the Homeless Mind
A Poetics of Relational Forms: The Sociality of Everyday Social Life
Analysing Everyday Explanation: A Casebook of Methods
Explanations are given and received in all areas of social life: in the home, at school, at work and in the courtroom. They are exchanged between friends and argued over by enemies. The analysis of these ordinary everyday explanations is regarded as a notoriously difficult area of study by social scientists. This book offers, for the first time, a clear and comprehensive guide to the most fruitful and interesting techniques for collecting, analys…
A Note on a Machine That ‘Learns’ Rules
A machine (C) is described which will learn to mimic creatively the behaviour of another machine (M) in this sense: after a certain number of ‘observations’ of M, C will begin to produce sequences of symbols not only like those that M produced but also like those that M might have produced but did not in the circumstances do so. If we say that M's behaviour is as if it were regulated by rules then we could say that C has learnt them. For human be…
The defense of empirical psychology
Acquired Powers: The Transformation of Natural into Personal Powers
Prolegomena to an Understanding of Play
Duality of Structure” and “Intentionality” in an Ecological Psychology
Social accountability and selfhood
Social Accountability and Self Specification
Accounting for Place and Space
It is proposed that social practices-practical social activities-involve a kind of knowledge distinct both from technical skills (knowing-how) and the application of theoretical knowledge (knowing-that); they involve a knowing of the third kind (knowing-from), a contextual form of knowing from within a situation which takes into account, in what is known, the situation within which it is known. Such a kind of knowledge cannot be communicated in t…
A sense of place: Vico and the social production of social identities
Currently there is a need for an account of the socio‐psychological or socio‐historical processes which produce not just single individuals but ‘collective individualities’ or ‘social identities’. This paper explores Vico's contribution to the solution of this problem. His account of such socio‐historical processes is unique in suggesting that socio‐historical processes develop neither by chance nor by necessity, but providentially , i.e. by the …
Social Accountability and Selfhood
Analysing Everyday Explanation: A Casebook of Methods
Explanations are given and received in all areas of social life: in the home, at school, at work and in the courtroom. They are exchanged between friends and argued over by enemies. The analysis of these ordinary everyday explanations is regarded as a notoriously difficult area of study by social scientists. This book offers, for the first time, a clear and comprehensive guide to the most fruitful and interesting techniques for collecting, analys…
Rhetoric and the recovery of civil society
By privileging the search for an overall order, both in its theorizing and in its aim, modern social theory has paid insufficient attention to the ‘zones’ of activity in between established institutions-called here the realm of civil society. This is an important neglect. For although the activity in such zones appears essentially disorderly, it permits many local and momentary orderings. Indeed, if one can speak of the ‘common sense’ of a social…
Getting in touch: The metamethodology of a postmodern science of mental life
In the past, much of modern science has been conducted from within a ‘mechanistic’ world view: the view 1) that ‘objective’ reality exists absolutely and apart from ind; 2) that the relations between all its parts are orderly, mechanical, causal, and necessary; and 3) that, because of its essentially passive nature, it can only be investigated by a one‐sided use of input‐output, cause and effect methods — in which observation is the main way in w…
Texts of Identity
Texts of Identity
Rhetoric and the Social Construction of Cognitivism
Making use of analytic devices recently introduced into psychology from rhetoric, cognitive psychology is criticized in a number of ways: (i) for reflexively failing to take into account its own rhetorical strategies in its social construction of its research `tradition'; (ii) for failing to guard against the textual creation of a set of problems, said to be real and to do with people's mental activities, but which are in fact imaginary; and (iii…
Making sense of the world: An interview with David Krantz
A Poetics of Relational Forms: The Sociality of Everyday Social Life
Social Constructionism and Realism: Adequacy or Accuracy
Greenwood's (1992) views are criticized from a social constructionist's point of view. It is argued that constructionism, because of its radical reflexivity, confronts itself with problems not faced by realism. Although it is true that constructionists do not treat talk as referring to an extra-linguistic reality `outside' of our conversational existence, this does not mean to say that we think just anything goes. It is still possible for us to d…
Is Bhaskar's critical realism only a theoretical realism
Bakhtin and Billig: Monological Versus Dialogical Practices
Harré, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Vico, Wittgenstein: Academic Discourses and Conversational Realities
Rhetoric and the Roots of the Homeless Mind
Social Construction: Knowledge, Self, Others, and Continuing the Conversation
Social constructionism’s relevance to communication studies is demonstrated through the development of three arguments. First, as theories of knowledge presume a theory of human functioning with others, traditional conceptions of the person are subject to transformation. Second, theories of communication are carefully intertwined with theories of the person and philosophies of knowledge. And, third, the conversational context of everyday life hol…
In Conversation: Joint Action, Shared Intentionality and Ethics
The conversational background to our lives is strange in that we cannot turn it around into an object of thought, to be explained like all else in our world in terms of either rules, theories or models. Its strangeness, it is argued, arises out of the fact that all actions by human beings involved with others in a social group are, as Bakhtin (1986, 1990) claims, dialogically or responsively linked in some way, both to previous, already executed …
Sociology (50 works) · Philosophy (47 works) · Epistemology (46 works) · Psychology (40 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Social Representations and Identity (20 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Aesthetics (18 works) · Linguistics (17 works) · Cognitive science (14 works)